Pasa Review

Borodin Quartet

The Borodin Quartet is remarkable for its longevity, still operating 72 years after it was founded under the name Moscow Philharmonic Quartet. It must be the longest-playing chamber ensemble currently active. As one would expect, none of its original members still figure in the group. The last of the old-timers, cellist Valentin Berlinsky, gave up his seat in 2007, the year before he passed away. He was practically a founding member though not literally one, since he signed on only when the original cellist, Mstislav Rostropovich, found his schedule too tight a few weeks after the group first set up its music stands.

Looming prominently in the Borodin Quartet’s history is its relationship with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

In a musically intimate group like a string quartet, traditions are passed on assiduously. Looming prominently in the Borodin Quartet’s history is its relationship with the composer Dmitri Shostakovich, to whose music the group devoted the second half of its concert at Simms Auditorium in Albuquerque this past Sunday — its first ever in the American Southwest. The Borodin was not the composer’s “personal quartet.” That was the Beethoven Quartet, to which he entrusted the premieres of all but the first and last of his 15 string quartets. Nonetheless, Shostakovich was sometimes known to prefer the follow-up performances given by the Borodins. On one occasion, he broached the idea of giving the Borodins first dibs on a new quartet; the Beethovens threw a hissy fit, and the composer decided it would be better to smooth their feathers in deference to his longstanding relationship with them. Although the four Borodin players who appeared in Albuquerque had no direct connection to Shostakovich personally (so far as I know), they inherit a tradition that may be considered to some degree authoritative.

And yet, their readings of his Quartets Nos. 6 and 13 did not seem to come from deep within their collective heart. The Sixth is a curious piece, inhabiting an emotionally ambivalent terrain. It is not despairing in the way Shostakovich can be, but it is more insouciant than overtly cheerful. The Borodins struck a dispassionate pose, but it answered none of the questions the piece invites and the composition remained nothing more than cryptic. The Sixth is not one of the indispensable entries among Shostakovich’s quartets, but the Thirteenth is. It is the third of four he wrote near the end of his career to honor individual members of the Beethoven Quartet, some of them in memoriam. The Thirteenth salutes their longtime violist, who had retired some years before this piece was composed in 1969-1970. The program note might have alluded to that fact, since it helps explain the unusually prominent viola part. This work sounds important in a way the Sixth does not, and it represented the highpoint of the concert through the power of the score itself. But, again, a listener yearned for more “interpretation.” The musicians played cleanly but without apparent enthusiasm for putting the piece across. One was left allowing that the music-making was generally admirable without feeling that it covered a wide sonic spectrum or conveyed great insight. Violist Igor Naidin upheld his part nobly, and it was tragic that his extended solo at the work’s end — a passage that culminates in stratospherically high pitches — was ruined by the extended ringing of a cell phone.

Part of the problem may have been the weak programming of the concert’s first half, which failed to build excitement about what would follow. It opened with Tchaikovsky’s complete Children’s Album, a set of 24 short, simple piano movements arranged for the quartet by its founding first violinist Rostislav Dubinsky. The settings might fly in Russia, where half of the audience would have thumped through these pieces during childhood piano lessons, but in this concert they seemed insubstantial to a fault. The group did infuse the numbers with distinct character, such as a veiled quality in “Morning Prayer” and “Old French Song” or raspy scraping in “Baba Yaga.” Dubinsky’s arrangements stick reverentially close to what Tchaikovsky wrote, and they remain too compressed in pitch-range to sound natively crafted to the rich potential of a string quartet. Twenty-four of these slight items were at least four times too many to serve as a program opener. Then followed Schubert’s bustling Quartettsatz in C minor, the sole completed movement of a quartet he started to write in 1820. It is ample in substance — the Schubert scholar Brian Newbould was probably right to call it “the first work in which Schubert reached full maturity as an instrumental composer (in any medium)” — but it is short, running perhaps nine minutes. The tone of first violinist Ruben Aharonian could prove overly penetrating, and only cellist Vladimir Balshin drew on a generous breadth of timbre and expression. The group modulated Schubert’s rhythmic details with care, but in the end, this also seemed a performance without much soul. — James M. Keller